The invention is directed to a heatable furnace for incinerating nuclear fission and/or fertile material waste, particularly plutonium and/or uranium containing organic waste by pyrohydrolysis with steam or burning with air oxygen in safe geometry.
There are known a series of pyrohydrolysis and combustion furnaces. They are almost exclusively employed for the conventional burning of house refuse. However, for burning of plutonium or uranium containing organic wastes for criticality reasons it is necessary to maintain nuclear safe geometries. To simply reduce the above mentioned conventional furnaces to safe geometry however has proven quite difficult for the following reasons.
1. In the narrow geometry transportation of material and combustion no longer function so that a smaller furnace is susceptible to disturbance.
2. The throughputs attainable are too small for industrial operation.
3. Nuclear fuel penetrates into the pores of the ceramic cladding and increases the nuclear criticality risk.
Thus there has been proposed, for example, for the pyrohydrolytic incineration of organic waste a continuously operating shell gravity discharge furnace (Germain P No. 26 41 264.6). To be sure it is readily possible to make this furnace in criticality safe layer thickness. However, the throughputs then attainable are very low (about 3 kg waste/hr). In the planned German Nuklearen Entsorgungs-zentrum, however from the plutonium operation along 1000-2000 cubic meters of contaminated organic wastes accumulate which correspond to a required plant capacity of about 35 kg/h.
Therefore it was the problem of this invention to design a furnace concept which permits the incineration of nuclear fission and fertile material waste, especially plutonium and/or uranium containing organic waste in safe geometry and on an industrial scale as well as in a safe manner of operation. The furnace should be eminently suited for the endothermal pyrohydrolysis, however, on principle likewise able to be employed for a combustion or pyrolysis.